Black Canyon Road on Wrong Side of Tracts : Landowners Wait as Boundaries Unravel

Jim Fitzpatrick just wanted to build his dream house in the quiet hills of Black Canyon overlooking Simi Valley, but he was blocked by an old road that got lost.

Chuck Wernke, another Black Canyon landowner, discovered that because of the lost road, he could not close some promising real estate deals for his four quarter-acre parcels. Holly Huff, a Black Canyon homeowner, learned that her living room is in the middle of the “road.”

The lost road appears on official county land ownership maps in the wrong place, almost 200 feet from its true location. That has caused problems for landowners in Black Canyon through a chain reaction of errors in the deeds to 22 lots, which are located in part by their relationship to the road.

Among the results: The county will not issue Fitzpatrick a building permit while there is doubt over just what land he owns.

The error, dating back to a 1927 survey for the subdivider of the land, shows Black Canyon Road running straight through what are actually hillside homes and lots, entangling the property owners in what they complain is a seemingly endless web of red tape.

Diagonal Path

As drawn on the map, Black Canyon Road cuts diagonally through the canyon about a quarter of a mile beyond where it leaves Katherine Road. In reality, the two-lane road follows a curving route along the tree-shrouded, often steep hillside.

The error was discovered three years ago by Ventura County officials, who had received a stream of phone calls from private surveyors demanding to know where the correct boundary lines were in Black Canyon, said Curran Cummings, assistant to Ventura County Supervisor Jim Dougherty.

The surveyors, mapping the land for property owners there, could not reconcile the boundaries that were drawn on the subdivision map with their location on the actual property sites, said Cummings.

The problem spurred county officials to conduct a center-line survey of the entire canyon. The result was the delayed discovery that Black Canyon Road is not where it is supposed to be.

Cummings said it is difficult to trace the mistake back to its source because officials are not certain which came first, the map or the road.

‘Easiest, Most Logical Place’

“We don’t know if it was made because of an error in the original survey, or if it was purely someone that started a road there because it was the easiest and most logical place to build a road,” Cummings said.

If the road had been built where the map says it should be, it would have traversed some of the steepest cliffs in the canyon, he said.

The county has agreed to help affected property owners by paying half of the $16,000 cost of a new survey, aimed at legitimizing the boundaries of their lots and the location of the road, Cummings said.

However, because the road is now on a site that previously had been designated as plots of land, eligible to be privately owned, county records are being searched to see if heirs of the original subdivider still have a claim to the land where the road now lies, Cummings said.

Some of the affected property owners were chagrined to learn that their land title insurance policies did not automatically protect them from such problems.

According to Dan Riordan, assistant vice president of Ticor Title Insurance, basic title insurance policies routinely include certain exclusions, usually including one for boundary discrepancies.

“Land title insurance assures a person that the previous owner has no claim” to the property, Riordan said. The insurance does not cover boundary discrepancies that would call the deed into question, he said.

More than 90% of basic title insurance policies carry the exclusion, he said, and the remainder will cover boundary discrepancies only after the current landowner conducts an updated survey.

If an heir of the original subdivider of Black Canyon lays claim to the land beneath the road, the current property owners might have to renegotiate their deeds, Riordan said.

Even without such a problem, the affected property owners must have a new survey done in order to correct the county records.

The problem has angered many of the property owners, especially Fitzpatrick, 36, and his wife, who have been forced to rent an apartment in Simi Valley during the long wait while records are being searched.

“I’ve got $70,000 stuck in a hole in the ground that I can’t do anything with,” said an exasperated Fitzpatrick. He might be forced to sell the land, he said, because of the expense of the apartment and the cost of renting a warehouse to store building materials.

Wernke, 45, is also impatient. He is not losing money, he said, but fears that potential buyers for his properties may lose interest if they are forced to wait much longer.

“If I could tell them for sure, ‘Hey, within a year it will all be over,’ then I think they’d wait,” Wernke said. “But right now, I don’t know. The county doesn’t know.”

Huff, 35, and her family have lived in their sprawling, two-story home for the past 14 years. While her family is not yet affected financially, she lives with the disturbing knowledge that, “as it stands now, none of us legally sits on the property we’re on,” she said.

“It’s got to be fixed.”

Huff said that 18 of the affected property owners have filed claims against the county, holding it liable if they lose their property rights. Huff said that the owners have agreed to drop the claims once the new map is recorded, recognizing their ownership of the land they thought was theirs all along.